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November 20, 2019

Starburst Raises $22M in Series A Financing

BOSTON, Nov. 20, 2019 – Starburst announced today that it has raised $22 million in Series A financing to invest in redefining the modern data warehouse architecture with its enterprise-ready Presto offering. The round—one of the largest Series A investments to date in the Northeast— was led by Index Ventures. Index Ventures Partner Mike Volpi will join the board. This funding will enable Starburst to invest in product development, customer acquisition, and growth.

Originally created by Starburst co-founders Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom, and David Phillips when they were at Facebook in 2012, Presto is the fastest-growing distributed SQL query engine available today. Enterprises across industries use Presto for its ultra-high-performance, concurrency, scalability, and ability to query petabyte-sized datasets, regardless of their location.

Starburst Presto turns the traditional data warehousing model on its head by enabling analysts to access data wherever it lives, via a simple SQL query.  Analysts no longer have to wait for IT to move the data into the data warehouse in order to be analyzed. Data engineers no longer have to worry about data duplication and complex ETL processes.  Data architects and data platform owners have infinite flexibility to adjust where their data is stored over time, without being locked-in to one particular storage vendor.

Every large enterprise in the world suffers from a data silo problem, where data is created and stored in a variety of disparate systems.  Traditional data warehouse products approach the problem by requiring customers to create duplicate copies of data from those source systems, transform it, and load it into one “single source of truth.”  This approach is extremely time and resource-intensive and results in painful vendor lock-in. As the industry gradually transitions to the cloud, the requirement to access data across public and private clouds only exacerbates the need for a different strategy.

“Starburst delivers data warehousing analytics, without the data warehouse,” said Starburst co-founder and CEO Justin Borgman.  “Nobody has had more success scaling open source businesses than Mike Volpi, and we are thrilled to have him join our board.”

“Data is becoming the greatest differentiator in today’s competitive environment,” said Mike Volpi. “Presto delivers unparalleled insight from that data, enabling businesses everywhere to bolster their competitive advantage. They are uniquely positioned to become one of the greatest data companies of our time.”

Starburst is already profitable and working with an impressive roster of high-profile customers, including Comcast, FINRA, and Zalando.

The company  was founded by Justin Borgman and a team of veteran SQL database engineers from Teradata and Facebook.  Whether using a popular business intelligence tool or writing SQL queries by hand, Starburst’s enterprise-ready distribution of Presto allows analysts to focus on their job and hides the complexity of the underlying infrastructure.  Starburst’s solution offers enhanced security, connectivity, manageability, and 24/7 support directly from the developers of Presto.

About Starburst 

Founded by the creators and leading developers of the open-source Presto project, Starburst gives analysts the freedom to analyze diverse data sets wherever their location, without compromising on performance. From federation across data silos on-premises, to high-performance data analytics in the cloud, Starburst allows you to query anything, anywhere.


Source: Starburst 

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